“Though you are gone from me

We never can really be apart

What’s written on the wind

Is written in my heart…”

So goes the chorus of the Four Aces’ “Written on the Wind,” which accompanies the opening credits of the 1956 movie by the same name. Earlier in the song, though, the band members’ sweet, boyish voices croon that “a faithless lover’s kiss is written on the wind…  A night of stolen bliss is written on the wind.” How can a love song be so dark and twisted beneath the surface and yet retain such a saccharine, pointlessly comforting chorus?

Contradictions like these are everywhere in the world of director Douglas Sirk, who made many popular “women’s films–” melodramas full of weeping, lushly doomed romance, peppered with the occasional Social Issue. Despite the seeming blandness of the genre, his movies are notable not for following certain conventions of their time and type but for how utterly unusual they are in any context. The stories go down smoothly, and yet certain hyper-emotional images and scenes stick painfully in the mind. They provide a rare (and appreciated) unity of visceral excitement and intellectual stimulation.

“All That Heaven Allows” (1955) ends up being more of the former, though genuine revelations do pop up along the way. Middle-aged Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) lives alone in a pretty suburban neighborhood. Her wealthy husband is dead, and she is more or less content in her lonely and uneventful life; she’s not too interested in her country-club circle of friends, and certainly gets no excitement from the aging bachelors who court her. When she falls in love with her younger, virile gardener, Ron (Rock Hudson), everything changes. He lives way out in the woods; his friends quote Thoreau and laugh heartily. The closest Cary’s repressed friends get to humor or philosophy is tight-lipped sarcasm, which manifests in their sneering pronouncements that “you’ve got to have money to have contempt for it.” Needless to say, they don’t go for Ron.

It’s here, in expressing the pettiness and fragility of this social circle, that Sirk’s glossy style excels. In cocktail party scenes, crowds of smirking, polished-looking bourgeois types murmur with menace and disapproval. And the insensitivity of Cary’s children to her needs is fleshed out in striking detail. When Cary’s socially uptight son confronts her, he does so at night, with stark blue moonlight and intense shadows behind him; deep piano punctuates his insults and refusals. In contrast, Cary’s daughter cries and asks for sympathy in soft, tender lighting, which makes it seem even more vicious that she demands that Cary give up her lover. The kicker is the kids’ Christmas present to Cary after she leaves Ron for them: a television set, complete with a salesman to present it. “Drama… comedy… Life’s parade at your fingertips,” he enthuses as Cary stares into her sad, shiny reflection.

The problem is that Ron is presented too flatly to be a convincing alternative to the other bachelors in Cary’s life. Hudson is very graceful, but Ron is not developed much beyond “a freethinking man who likes nature.” When Cary finally returns to Ron, she notices that his house has been fixed up nicely. “This room… The beauty that Ron’s put into it… and the love,” she gushes. And the room Sirk shows us is pretty indeed, perhaps too much so. It’s not especially different from the aesthetic ideal embodied by Cary’s suburban home, except that it’s earthy instead of elegant. The ending of the film belies the sophistication that precedes it: it’s generically happy, with little sense of what that means. It leaves the viewer to wonder where all the urgency and tension went.

“Written on the Wind” (1956) examines Rock Hudson’s earthy charisma more closely and finds something truly disturbing. Hudson’s character, Mitch Wayne—a “country boy” who works for and is friends with a monstrously wealthy oil family—is the ostensible hero of the film. He’s the one who saves the day, gets the girl, 

etcetera etcetera. But here Sirk is far more interested in failures than in successes. His most vivid characters are Kyle Hadley, the alcoholic rich-kid played by a superbly manic Robert Stack, and his rebelliously trashy sister Marylee, played by Dorothy Malone in an aggressively unattractive performance somewhere between a noir femme fatale and porn actress. What makes us like Marylee, for all her sourness, is that she loves good guy Mitch. Mitch, however, loves Lucy (Lauren Bacall), a smart and self-respecting woman who, in turn, loves Kyle (who loves her back). When Lucy first meets Kyle, he leers at her lecherously, much like Dennis Hopper does in “Blue Velvet,” while Mitch watches politely on the sidelines. Still, Lucy clearly prefers Kyle to Mitch, which confuses us; isn’t Mitch supposed to be the good guy, the earthy hero? For a while, it seems like spoiled-brat Kyle will learn to fill that role himself, helped along by Lucy’s love.

What brings Kyle down is not a renewed lust for his wild years after marrying Lucy; rather, he becomes terrified when his doctor tells him he may not be able to have children. One piece of the standard wife-house-kids dream comes into question, and the whole thing falls apart. Kyle spirals downward into emasculated weakness, which leaves him without the ugly self-confidence he started with. Although Mitch doesn’t actively promote or encourage this, his resentment for Kyle’s married success exerts a palpable, unseen force, something for which he is never held accountable because, well, he’s the good guy.

We end where we began–except that, in an amazing shift, Marylee becomes the hero. Her love for Mitch leads her to sacrifice and reveal goodness beneath her bitterness, even though it doesn’t help her. She can only watch helplessly as Mitch gets what he wants; it’s written on the wind. For her, though, they can never really be apart. The film finds truth written not in the heart of the hero or his virtuous beloved, but in the heart of the tramp—the spoiled brat whom no one can really forgive or love.  What an awakening.